I remember John Perkins. He was a real jerk. A gold-plated, super-slick lying little butthole shill for corporate gangsters; a snake-oil salesman with a movie-star grin, shiny loafers, a crooked calculator and a tooled leather briefcase full of high-blown bullshit.
– Greg Palast (Greg Palast)

Despite Greg Palast’s spleenish dismissal from an earlier time, John Perkins has emerged as a spiritual, intellectual and political authority. He is an important leader of contemporary neo-shamanism, one of today’s most effective critics of American corporate culture, and a story teller capable of overshadowing the legendary Ian Fleming, who created James Bond, when it comes a tales of imperial adventure and conquest.

He is working to offer a vision, or a ‘dream change’ as he calls it, designed to rescue America, and the world it dominates, from the destruction of rampant corporate energy. He works to achieve these ends by recounting in a disarmingly honest and sensitive way the personal adventures and dilemmas he has experienced in diverse and exotic parts of the world.

Perkins first gained a reputation in the 1990s for a series of books on shamanic cultures amongst remote tribes and peoples. Around a decade later and prompted by the events of 9/11, he published Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in 2005. This describes life as part of an elite group trained to “utilise international financial organisations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks.”

After twenty-seven publishers turned it down, the book came out of nowhere to be an international best seller, and is about to be made into a Hollywood movie. It went to number four on Amazon during its first week and was quickly on all best-seller lists. This was achieved without receiving any mainstream media attention.

Most importantly, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has provided credibility, authority and celebrity in opening up new areas of thought. These range across corporate power, American empire, shaman spirituality and environmental consciousness.